Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #532: Morph

Episode Date: April 27, 2018

In this podcast I walk through the history of the morph mechanic from its origin to its use in Khans of Tarkir block.

I'm pulling out of my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so today is the history of the Morph Mechanic. So, for those that do not know, let me first explain what the Morph Mechanic is, and then I will walk through its history. The Morph Mechanic is a mechanic that first showed up in Onslaught, then Time Spiral, then Kanzatarkir. I will go through all that today. that first showed up in Onslaught, then Time Spiral, then Kanzatarkir. I will go through all that today. It's a mechanic that allows you to spend three mana to play a card from your hand face down while it's in play. It's a colorless 2-2 creature.

And then you can pay the morph cost to turn the card face up to become whatever it normally is. That is a morph mechanic. There's some variants of it and other stuff I will get to, but that, let me start by saying that. So, where exactly, how exactly did the morph mechanic begin? So to do that, we've got to go all the way back to Alpha.

So there were two cards in Alpha that Richard Garfield made. One was called Camouflage, and the other was called Illusionary Mask. And both cards played around with, my creature is a mystery. I turn it face down. They don't know what it is. So the way it worked is, early on, the rules when they first came out, like I remember playing with Camouflage,

the rules were, you only told your opponent information that was necessary when they interacted with it. So for example, let's say I play, I camouflage a creature, and they go, okay, I cast terror on it. So terror destroys target non-black,

non-artifact creature. You would either go, it's dead, and they would see what it is, or nope, not dead, and now they learn it must be an artifact or a black creature or something with protection from black or, you know, okay, something that can't be killed by this spell.

And it was kind of fun in a loosey-goosey way of, oh, what is this creature, you know? And the idea was you only gave information when it was relevant. But that wasn't something that actually worked in tournaments was the problem. It wasn't something that was practical. And Illusionary Medicine and Chemical Science basically had the same

shtick, which is you turn a card face down and ooh, what is it? So basically what happened is the rules team the card existed. Both cards were out there. The rules team needed to figure out how to make it work. Because the rules behind it were, like I said, were loosey-goosey. They weren't really.

So, okay, how do we actually make this work in tournaments? Now, at the time, there was what was called the rules team. That concept doesn't quite exist right now. What it meant was, there were a bunch of different people in the early days of Magic, just to give you a little context. When Richard first made the game,

I think one of the things that Richard liked was that the game had complications, but hey, you the players could sort of figure out what you thought happened. And when the game was just kind of a casual game you played in your house, you know, the idea that you'd get situations you had to figure it out for yourselves was fine. And I think when Richard first envisioned the game was just kind of a casual game you played in your house. You know, the idea that you'd get situations you had to figure it out for yourselves was fine. And I think when Richard first envisioned the game, look, it was a small game that people sort of had fun with. And oh, if weird things came up, then part of the fun of the game was, hey, figure out what happens. But the game ended up being way bigger than anyone predicted. And part of that meant there were tournaments. That magic tournaments became a big part of magic. Well, it's one thing to have kind of, you know, loosey-goosey rules when you're just sort of playing at home and whatever, you can figure it out.

You know, you sort of have house rules to figure out how things work. But in a tournament where everybody's playing together, things have to work similarly. So there's a lot of pressure to sort of unify the rules. That's where 6th edition came from. pressure to sort of unify the rules. That's where 6th edition came from. So because there was a lot of energy early on to sort of consolidate the rules, there was an entire

team dedicated. It wasn't that that was their full-time job. It was just a bunch of people who were connected enough that they would get together from time to time and talk through things. Because in the beginning, in the wild west of the rules days, for example, Tom Wiley, who was one of the rules managers early on,

made a graph one time in the Duelist, and it was drawn like it was a rat maze. And it was kind of funny, because ha-ha, it's like a rat maze, but not so funny, because ha-ha, it's kind of like a rat maze. It was really, really complicated. The reason the 6th edition rules happened was just to clean a lot of things up and make a lot of things consistent.

So anyway, the rules team existed to try to make sense of a lot of things that didn't make sense. And some of it was easy, some of it was hard, and some of it, like illusionary mask and camouflage, was downright near impossible. And so they struggled with this card, with cards,

for quite a while until somebody on the rules team, I don't know who it was, came up with the following idea. What if you defined the state of a face-down card? When I said a card turned face down, that meant it was a certain thing. We'll tell you what it is. All face-down cards are this thing. But what would make camouflage and illusionary mask interesting was that you could turn them face up when you needed to. So, well, what would happen if they're face down? Now the rules answer. There's something. Is it a find thing? So the idea they had was a face-down creature would be a 1-1 creature. So if you ever had to interact with it, well, you know it's a 1-1 creature. But both camouflage and illusionary masks gave the ability to turn it up. So if they went to do one damage to it, and your creature is bigger than one toughness, you go, oh, ha ha, here's what I am. And not only do they like that answer, they thought it was a

pretty clean answer for a very complex problem, but they realized that it might be an entire mechanic that could take it. This was big enough that maybe you could make a mechanic out of it. So they went to, I think at the time they went to Bill Rose, and they said to Bill, okay, we came to this really clever answer for illusionary masking camouflage, what if this was a mechanic? And Bill said, eh. So, undaunted, they went to Mike Elliott, because Mike was leading the Vanua set onslaught at the time, and said to Mike, okay, what do you think of this? You know, it's, it's, you can put a face down, and then you can turn the face up, and this and that. And Mike Elliott went, eh. So, undaunted,

they came to me. And I wasn't actually, I wasn't leading Onslaught, but they, I was one of the people, I was one of the designers. So maybe if I liked it, I'd put it somewhere. So they showed it to me and I'm like, that is awesome. I really liked it. I said, okay, I'd make, I'd make a couple changes. One is I felt that 1-1 wasn't enough substance. I think originally it was like you pay two mana for a 1-1 was what they had suggested. And I said, how about three mana for a 2-2? Now remember, a lot of this was costed back where creatures were at. You know what I'm saying? I was kind of making a gray ogre at a time where

gray ogre, you know, Pearl Unicorn were things we made. But anyway, the other thing that I suggested was I liked the idea that when you turn things face up, that not only did you now get a creature, but maybe things happen. Maybe spell effects could happen. And I really like the idea of reveal triggers. So what happened was I knew that Bill didn't like it. I knew that Mike didn't like it. Now it turns out, interestingly, at the same time, Mike had turned in the design for Onslaught and Bill, who was the head designer at the time, was a little bit underwhelmed. And he brought me in to see if I could spice it up some.

And I've done a whole podcast on Onslaught. You can learn all about that. But anyway, what happened was I liked Morph. And I thought maybe that Morph could be something we could use in Onslaught. We were looking for something new and splashy. And I really liked Morph. But I knew I needed to get more groundswell. And so I came up with an idea that's something that really actually influenced me a lot down

the road, which is I said, okay, I need more people to like it. How do I do that? Well, what if I just make cards and then make a deck and then play people with it? And so what I did was I made a bunch of Morph it. And so what I did was, I made a bunch of morph cards. I made normal morph cards. I made some morph trigger cards. I sort of showed all of what the mechanic could do. And then I made two decks that both used the mechanic.

And then I... So, at this point, we had... I think dual decks weren't a thing yet, but we did do pre-constructed decks. Something I did back in the day, back before I came to Wizards, is, and this in some level was one of the precursors to the dual decks, by the way, is I loved the idea of, I was a Johnny, I loved the idea of building decks to play against each other. And I used to have this thing where I would build two quirky decks

specifically designed to be played against one another. So I said, okay, that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to make two decks. I made them so they would play well against each other. And it just mostly was showing off more. I really made two decks that would sort of make a gameplay that just would show off more. And since I knew that both Bill and Mike were kind of in about it, I decided to start by showing other people. So I played with Randy.

And I thought, when was this? This was on slot. So I played with all sorts of different people that were there at the time. And little by little, as I played with people, I got them excited by it. And eventually, I got enough people excited by it that I went to Bill. Because one of the things about Bill, and this has always been true about him, is when enough people like something, you know, he listens to other people, and, you know, excuse me, goes and hikes to myself, when enough people show enthusiasm, you know, he starts to

get interested. So I start to build the groundswell in R&D using this mechanic. So at some point, I went to Bill, and I was able to say, Bill, okay, Bill, I know the rules team came to you, they came to me. I liked it, but I knew it needed a little bit of modification. So I worked with them, we made some changes. I then made a bunch of cards as proof of concept, and then I made two decks to play. I've been playing around R&D, I've been getting really good feedback. I'd like to play with you.

And so I played with Bill and we had a really good play test. Bill liked it. Now that he saw it all together and he knew the response from other people, Bill said, okay, you know what? I did not give this a fair shake first time around. This is a really cool mechanic. And so I got

Bill's sign off to put it into OnSlot. I eventually showed it to Mike after everybody else liked it. I got Mike on board. Mike was a little trickier to get on board. Once Mike makes up his mind, it was more challenging. But I did. I did. Mike was capable of changing his mind.

And I think once he sort of saw it in action, when the rules team talked to them, it was very sort of oblique. You know what I'm saying? And sometimes seeing the finished product is hard. Um, and so one of the things I find about making cards is I'm really good at sort of seeing where things go, but I need to sort of realize that for people so they can act,

you know, it's not just imagine if it's like, no, no, no, play these cards. So anyway, I got the thumbs up from Bill to put Onslaught, I'm sorry, to put, uh, Morph into Onslaught. Um, I eventually the thumbs up from Bill to put Onslaught, I'm sorry, to put Morph into Onslaught. I eventually got Mike on board. Mike was the lead of Onslaught. And so we put it in. And then what we did is, I think we saved some of the reveal triggers to be, this is back in the day where the mechanic we introduced in the fall set

and tweaked twice in the spring, in the day where the mechanic we introduced in the fall set and tweaked twice in the winter and the spring sets. So I think what we did is we introduced Morph, but we didn't introduce triggers until Legions, I think. Also Legions had this flavor of all creatures,

and by putting triggers on them, it allowed us to mimic some spells, put something that had more spell-like quality in the set with only creatures. And by putting triggers on them, it allowed us to mimic some spells, to put something that had more spell-like quality in the set with only creatures. And then we also toyed around with later of, I think in Scourge, we messed around a little bit with other costs, maybe

to unmorph something. I think Scourge had the first creature that didn't require mana to unmorph it, or demorph it, I don't know. I mean, we never quite figured out with the word morph, when you turn it face up, what does that mean? Is morphing it the act of putting it face down? Is morphing the act of turning it into the thing you're turning it to?

I always say unmorphing. I feel like morphing is playing it, but anyway. Okay, so we made this mechanic. It went out, and the public really liked it. You know, we knew that it was a little on the tricky side. Oh, creatively, the creative team had to answer what exactly this was. And so in the story of Onslaught, there's a man named Ixador. Not Ixalan, by the way. Ixador. I had a podcast a while ago when I was talking about Ixador.

And this is before Ixalan came out. And I said Ixalan. And luckily, Ixalan got announced like a month later or something. But I used the wrong word. And anyway, for those who like to know, slip-ups that,

there was a little slip-up where I used the wrong name. At the time, no one knew what Ixalan was. So like, oh, he means Ixador. He messed it up. No one really thought that Ixalan was, so like, oh, he means Ixador, he messed it up. No one really thought Ixalan was a thing, but anyway, it was. Ixador

was this illusionist that could sort of bring illusions to life. So one of the things that we decided that his magic could do was it could hide the essence of what things were. And so in Onslaught, they showed up as these like clay spiders.

And the idea is you didn't know what's really inside it. And so if you look at the expansion symbol for Onslaught, it's a spider symbol. That represents the clay spiders of the morph creatures. Now, that was a little silly. I mean, later on, we sort of reframe the visuals of it. The clay spider was not Morph's finest hour of how it was portrayed. Okay, so we did it. It was popular.

So the next time Morph showed its, or reared its lovely head was during Time Spiral block. So one of the things about Time Spiral block was we were doing a Nostalgia block and we were bringing back a lot of old mechanics. A lot. A lot of old mechanics. For some reason we convinced ourselves that, you know, people know those mechanics, they

play them already. So, yeah, yeah, we'll give you new mechanics. And then just, eh, just bring back old mechanics. Not really taking into account that if you didn't know the old mechanic, it was a new mechanic to you. So, I don't remember exactly how many mechanics Time Spiral itself had, but like 12 to 15. But one of the mechanics we brought back was Morph. Because Morph's a lot of fun.

So, one of the things we played around with with Morph in Time Spiral Block is, so Brian Schneider was the lead developer at the time, and one of the things that early Morph had done that had been in general people liked Morph, but there was a few things they didn't like about it. So one was, I'm not going to remember the names,

there were two cards in Onslaught that were red creatures, and one had a saboteur ability, meaning if it hit your opponent, it did something... I forget what it did, but it did something pretty powerful. And another was a creature with high power and first strike. And they're both common red creatures. So the problem was, I'm playing against red, they play a morph, and I get in a situation where...

And I think they both require the same amount of mana to turn face up. So here's a creature, they have the mana, you know, they play to face down, they have the proper mana to turn to face up, and oh, one version, if I don't block, I

get wrecked, and another version, if I do block, you know, it's like, what do I do? It's like flipping a coin. It had too much randomness into it that I didn't know what was going to happen. Some of the fun of Morph is that you don't know what's going to happen. But a situation in which literally, like, I don't do one thing, I get in trouble. And I don't do the other thing, I get in trouble.

And like, how do I know which way it is? I have no idea how to know. So Brian came up with an idea of what if we were a little bit more careful how destructive morphed creatures were. So he made something he called the Rule of Five. So what the Rule of Five said was that until you got to five mana,

morphed creatures wouldn't, what we call, beat the other creature. What that meant was it wouldn't destroy it and survive. So the idea was if I have a morph creature, you have a morph creature, and you block my morph creature, my morph creature can't survive and win. So what we sort of chose to do is

if you're going to have a two power or higher and a three toughness or higher, meaning I will beat your morph creature and I won't lose my morph creature, that costs five mana. There are some exceptions made, I think at higher rarities, but at common and I think at uncommon, the idea was, you had

some idea of, you know, it wasn't crazy to block morphs with a morph early on if they hadn't got to five mana yet. That you might trade, you might bounce. So trade means you kill each other. Bounce means neither kills the other. But you wouldn't be beaten by, you wouldn't just, they win, you lose. And that allowed, you know, like, I think I think Morph was really appreciated the first time it came out there was a lot of fun to it

there was a lot of neat sort of guess work based on how much mana they leave out versus what colors they're playing versus sort of subtle clues you know

they have acting by when they attack and when they don't and you know there was a lot of neat things that went into that and so

Brian really sort of put a lot of development resources into fixing some of the problems that the previous Morphit had. And then on the design side, we really had a lot of fun figuring out how to use Morph in interesting ways. Like one of the things we did is we made a cycle of Morph creatures that turn into famous magic creatures from the past. That when you unmorph it, ha-ha, it didn't have the name of the thing from the past,

but you could tell it was that thing from the past. You know, ha-ha, it is something that you know. Because there's the nostalgia theme in Time Spiral. And then I think think was it in Legions? We also did one where you un-morph and the

trigger spell was a famous spell from the past. You know, we had a lot of fun of sort of making use and we played around

a little bit more with what are other costs you could do. Obviously, in Future Sight I mix and matched things so we played a little bit with morph that you I mix and matched things

so we played a little bit with morph that you can mix with other things other mechanics we also because of Future Sight we could play around with some things we had done before there was actually a vertical cycle in Future Sight

where we had a land with morph an enchantment with morph and a artifact with morph a non-creature artifact with morph. So like here's morph creatures that turn into non-creatures. That isn't something we really, we've done much with other than that. I'll get to cons in a second. But anyway, we really, the nice thing about Time Spiral was we took morph and we really played around with it. And we cleaned up some problems developmentally that it had the first time. And we experimented a little more on the design side of what we could do with it.

And there's a lot of fun things we could do with it. The other thing we did in Time Spyro, I think, is we focused Morph in certain colors for Limited. Not that all the colors didn't have Morph at high rarities. But we said, oh, you want to play morph. There were a lot of mechanics, obviously, in the set, but morph, I forgot the colors, it was pushed in.

It was pushed into two colors. I'm blanking on them. This is my lack of memory for memory limited. But anyway, we focused it, and so we said morph is more about certain colors than other colors for limited. And we had in Onslaught, we focused it. And so we said Morph is more about certain colors than other colors for limited. And we had, in Onslaught, we had really everything. All the colors had it, and it was a little more focused.

But anyway, Time Spoke for me was a lot of us sort of refining and cleaning up. Okay, now we flash forward to cons of Tarkir. So one of the things, if you remember, I did a podcast on cons. To remind everybody, the premise that we started with was it was going to be a block that went large, small, large. Because at that point, every other year, we had a large spring set.

And I was trying to figure out a world that made sense for large, small, large. And I liked the idea of a world in which the small set got played with both the first set and the third set, but the two large sets didn't get played with each other. Normally, the way we had done it is the fall set

and the winter set got played together and the spring set got played by itself. And I really, really liked the idea of having this pivot set where the pivot set would, you know, certain cards

meant more something in the first set and then would change its relevance when played with the second set or the third set., you know, certain cards meant more something in the first set and then would change its relevance when played the second set or third set. I thought that was cool. So it turned out that the Great Designer Search 2 had just completed and we, both the winner,

Ethan Fleischer, and the second place, Sean Main, had got internships. Ethan had won the design internship and Sean had won, I think Sean had won a digital magic internship. Anyway, I had access to both of them. And one of the things we were really interested in with the second grade designer search was we were looking for people that had a lot of sort of vision skills. The first and the third was more about sort of card making.

The second had a little bit more about world building. So anyway, I had two people that were good at world building, so I set them on the task. We started a year early, and this is where exploratory design came from. Like, this morphed into exploratory design. We had a time, and I said to them, okay, we have lots of time. I want you guys to figure out what could this be? Large, small, large. The large sets aren't played together. Tell me the world that it could be. And they came up with a bunch of different ideas. The one that obviously stuck was a time travel

story in which our character, you know, we have a world. Our character goes back in time, fundamentally changes something about the world, and then comes back to an alternate timeline in which now things are different. And in that story, it made sense why the fall set was played with the winter set and why the winter set

was played with the spring set. That the fall set and the spring set represented parallel versions of the same, you know, of different timelines of the same

or different variations of the timeline. Hold on a second. I'm going to take a drink of water. I don't keep coughing. One second. So we had this idea of doing a time travel set. And one of the things that I knew we wanted to do was I liked the idea of a mechanic that showed up in the first set, got tweaked in the second set, and got tweaked in the third set. And the idea is... My thought is we have a mechanic, we show the proto version of the mechanic in the past,

and we show an alternate version of the mechanic in the alternate present. One more second, sorry. mechanic and the alternate present. One more second. Sorry. I'm trying to shake this cold. See, the regular listeners can tell. He was coughing the other day and he was sneezing. Anyway, my podcast is the evolution of my cold. Okay. So I like the idea of mechanic, proto-mechanic, alternate mechanic. And so what happened was, I was trying to find something that had enough depth to it that we could riff on and do cool things. And after looking at a whole bunch of mechanics, I and Ethan and Sean sort of all looked together, we came to the clue that morph was something that had, it was

big enough that it could sustain and have enough depth potential that we could do other things with it. So I worked with them, and so we came up with three things. The idea was morph would be the first mechanic, just plain morph. Second one would be what ended up being called manifest. And third was something that we called oramorph. So what oramorph was is they were auras. And so the idea was that you played them face down as creatures

and then when you turned them face up, they turned into auras that you would then attach to something. We did some initial play testing and we found it was fun. So anyway, we set that up. That's what we were going to do. We were going to do that.

Now, remember, this was before Wedge was a thing. This is very early on. In fact, early on, I talked to Brady. Brady Donovan was creative director at the time. And Brady liked the idea of this being Sarkin's home world. And the idea that the world without dragons goes back in time, changes something, world with dragons.

That's the idea we came to. Originally, the third set was going changes something, world with dragons. That's the idea we came to. Originally the third set was going to be an enemy color set. I talk all about this if you listen to my podcast on the Constant Tarkir block. It turned out that they needed to be it needed to be ally because

a wedge set wanted an enemy support so that you could draft enemy and then go into the wedge colors. So drafting enemies was what the first set was going to be about. So if the last set was enemy, it would be too similar. So we ended up making that ally. I promise one day we'll get another enemy set. So anyway, so what happened was we made morph and put it in the first set.

And then it turned out that we we knew there's gonna be a multicolored element to it but we didn't realize until a little bit into it that it's going to be Wedge. In fact, we didn't realize there's gonna be Wedge until about maybe three months into design. Design at the time was old-school design, 12 months. But three months in we figured out we were doing Wedge. But at that point, Morph was pretty ingrained, and we had been using Morph as a way to help offset the multicoloredness of it. And especially now that we were doing three-color, we're like,

okay, maybe we can use Morph as a way to help, you know, one of the problems with three-color in general is making your mana work. And Morph actually works nicely in a multi-color environment because you can play the creatures. You might not be able to turn them face up just yet, but as you later get

mana you'll be able to do that and you can bluff things and your opponent doesn't know what you can or can't turn up. A lot of people say, if you play a morph and you don't have the mana to turn it up, it's just a 2-2. That is not true. And the reason is it has potential to be something. The opponent has to act as if you could morph it up. And so even though they don't know that you can't, they have to treat it like you can. And so there's a lot of power in the

unknown where people are forced to reply to sort of the nature of what can be, even though you happen to know it can't be. And so I found that to be an interesting dynamic that a lot of people don't take into account is the power of Morph even when you can't play it. Anyway, by the time we figured out we were going to be Wedge, Morph had really become a pretty ingrained

part of what we were doing. In retrospect, if I, you know, one of the things I look all over again, cons ended up being pretty complex. I don't know whether it needed Morph. Once it had the Wedge identities, once the clans were kind of the identities of the block, and then the clans went through

changes, that the clans did a lot of the job of, here are clans were kind of the identities of the block and that the clans went through changes, that the clans did a lot of the job of, here are clans, here are proto-clans, here are alternate clans, a lot of what I'd wanted Morph to do and why Morph was originally entered into the set. To make matters worse, what happened was when we got to... Um...

Um... Um... Um... Um... Before, uh... What was it called? Concentrator up before what was it called? I'm blanking on that name now. The middle set, it was

Concentrator, Dreadnought, and Fate Reforged. When we got to Fate Reforged, we still had Manifest as the proto-mechanic. Manifest was a really cool mechanic anyway. We knew there were some things with it, and we knew it had some complications, but people liked it. It was fun.

So we decided to go ahead with it. Then, when we got to Dragons of Tarkir, they started playing with Orimorph. And Orimorph ended up having some problems that we, like, initial playtesting really didn't show us.

It was a fun mechanic, but once you sort of got good players playing it, it did this weird thing where it acted opposite of morph. So remember the problem I talked about with the red commons was that if I'm going to

block something in a morph world, I do one thing. If I'm going to block it in a morph world, I do one thing. If I'm going to block it in an aura morph world, you do a different thing. So, for example, let's say I attack with a morph creature and an un-morphed creature. So I attack with a face-down 2-2 and a 3-3. And you have a 3-3.

In a morph world, a lot of times what you want to do is you want to block the morph creature because, especially if you're low on life, the morph creature is the bigger threat. And so you normally will block the morph creature because the creature that you're letting through, you know what it is. You know, oh, if I don't block that, I'm going to take exactly 3 damage. But in Aurimorph world, it is the non-morph creature that actually is the threat.

And so what ended up happening was that the correct play was to block the non-morph stuff. And so it just, you kind of, the Aurimorph creatures kind of were unblockable. And so it just, you kind of, the, the, the Oremorph creatures kind of were unblockable. And so it just, the gameplay just didn't quite work out. It's one of those examples where on the surface it seems fun when you're kind of playing around. Like when design plays around with something, we're really sort of just testing it. We're not, we're not sort of, we're not optimizing it, like making sure that we understand how to optimally play it. We're just trying to make sure it's fun. And it's fun.

It was a fun mechanic. like making sure that we understand how to optimally play it, we're just trying to make sure it's fun. And it's fun. It was a fun mechanic. But when you sort of optimize it, some mechanics, when you optimize, they end up sort of, the correct way to play them, once you understand how to play them, isn't particularly fun. And what ended up happening was that just no one was blocking them. And so they were much, you know, for example,

the threat of blocking an Orimorph creature is, okay, if I block the other creature, you know, if it un-morphs, all it's going to do is change the other creature. Maybe that kills my creature that blocks it, but no damage gets through. You know, the unexpected isn't there. And so a lot of the correct play was, okay, I guess I just hit you for two. So a lot of the correct play was, okay, I guess I just hit you for two. And one of the fun things about the Morph mechanic in general is, I talk about this a lot, you want to make the fun thing about your mechanic the correct way to play.

So Morph does this neat thing where it kind of encourages you turning things face up. There's a lot of mechanical reason to block them. And if you have the mana, you want to turn them face up. There's a lot of mechanical reason to block them, and if you have the mana, you want to turn them face up. So, you know, the way you play Morph makes you want to turn them up. But the way Ormorph worked was that you just didn't get to turn them up all that much. The correct way to play and respond to them meant that a lot of the time, they just stayed face down.

And so many games were ending where they just, it's kind of like I had a tutu creature that you were afraid to block. And so it just didn't get turned on much. It ended up being, the fun wasn't where the gameplay was. So they had to come up with other options. So let me talk a little bit now about the many options of alternate morph. We did play some other alternate morph mechanics. So first off, let me talk a little bit about Borf. So Borf was...

So when we first talked about bringing back the morph mechanic, Eric Lauer and I had a lot of discussions. One of the things was when Morph was made, 3 mana for a 2-2 was reasonable within the context of where creatures were at. But one of the things Eric said is, we've made creatures a lot better since then. Maybe a 3 mana 2-2 just is too weak. And so he said, you know, maybe we want to consider changing Morph to a new named mechanic, which we called borf for bear morph, in which instead of it's three mana for a 2-2, it is two mana for a 2-2. That you pay two, it's a 2-2.

So the idea there was all the rules say is a face-down creature is a 2-2. You can get it face-down in other ways, in other means. Obviously, a manifest, for example, does. So we can make a new mechanic and say, okay, it's new morph and new morph, just you pay 2 rather than 3. And we were back and forth. The downside of that

is people like morph and morph is a known thing and has equity built into it. But anyway, Eric said, you know what? Nah, nah, we'll keep Morph. And then a good chunk of the way in, things were progressing pretty well. We were a bit ahead of schedule. Eric sort of said, you know what? Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe we want Borf. And I said, Eric, Eric, I asked you this months ago. And he goes, well, I didn't know the time and now that I'm seeing how things played out, you know what?

Maybe we went boar. So we did something unique that we haven't done before. So that set was called Huey, Dewey, Louie. And we ended up making a set, I think we called it Gooey, for Gooey Duck. It was Huey, Dewey, Louie. And Gooey was, we just tookwey, and Louie. And Gooey was... We just took the file as we had it. We then changed all the normal morph to Borf.

And then we adapted the file to, okay, well, if creature... If Borf's a thing... So it made us change mana cost. Because when you play morph, you sort of bend around the three drop. And so here we had to bend around the three drop, and so here we had to bend around the two drop. Also, some of the creatures needed a little bit of tweaking.

You know, for example, you don't do a raw two drop that you can morph in a world, and Morph you'll make that. They're like, oh, in two drop you can just drop it, but at three drop maybe you want to hide it, you know, anyway. There were some things we had to change, so what we did is we kept the file, we called it mirror the file, we duplicated the file, so that we could playtest with this other version of the file, and if we wanted to go back, we had the original file maintained. So we

played with BORF for, I think, six weeks. Originally it was going to be a month, it ended up being six weeks. And Eric and the developers chimed in and played a bunch and sort of they had a month to sort of figure out whether they liked Morph as is. So they ended up deciding that no,

Morph was okay. And you know, Eric had instituted the rule of five and a bunch of stuff that Brian Schneider had laid out. Eric really went and studied. One of the things Eric does whenever he brings back a mechanic is he goes and looks how he's used before.

So he looked at Onslaught and all that block. He looked at Time Spartan and all that block. And he came to the conclusion a lot of what Brian had is Morph was an interesting mechanic.

There were neat choices. Onslaught didn't really understand all the ramifications of it. Made some mistakes. But he really liked what Brian Schneider had done. And so he

edited a few things. But mostly he sort of followed the philosophy of it, made some mistakes, but he really liked what Brian Schneider had done, and so he edited a few things, but mostly he sort of followed the philosophy that Brian had set up. Anyway, they played with Borf, they decided that Borf was not, we retreated back. Now, there were some other things that we tried for, I was on the design team for Dragon's Dark here. We did try a bunch of other things. We did try, I guess we didn't try BORF because before we had started with the BORF experiment, I believe. And once Eric said no, I think we talked about, once we left BORF, we then talked about, hey, do we maybe want to do BORF? Like, now that you've come back, it's just better? But we decided that you can't have a

standard environment in which you had both Morph and Borf. Because someone would play a face-down creature, then you would have to mark every face-down creature whether they paid two to cast it or three to cast it, and that just wasn't worth the energy to make people do that. Okay, so

Borf was out. So, an Orimorph we had tried, and Orimorph was out. So my favorite of the variants was what we called Smorf. And this was one of the ones I came up with. So what Smorf did is Smorf said, okay, instead of paying three mana for a 2-2, you pay four mana for a 3-3. And the way we did that, because a face-down creature is considered a 2-2, you pay 4 mana for a 3-3. And the way we did that, because a face-down creature is considered a 2-2, is it came with

a plus-one, plus-one counter. So the idea was that you would pay 4 mana, you would get a 3-3, and when you turn it face-up, that plus-one, plus-one counter stayed. And so I liked about it, there's a lot of things I liked about Smurf. One is, it just one plus one counter stayed. And so I liked about, there's a lot of things I liked about Smurf. One is, it just was different than Morph. If you played against Morph, you know, you really are used to sort of wrapping around

the three drop and a two two. And all of a sudden, it's no, no, no, it's four drop and a three three. It allowed us to make a lot more things that curved under it, which is something that Morph doesn't do all that often. And anyway, it played really interestingly. I really, really like the way it played.

And the fact that you got a plus one, plus one counter was really interesting because a lot of times when you have a card and you don't know, like once you can hard cast something, why would you want to morph it? Now, there's reasons why you might want to morph it. Maybe it has a trigger when you reveal it, when you unmorph it. So maybe you want to morph it? Now, there's reasons why you might want to morph it. Maybe it has a trigger when you reveal it, when you unmorph it.

So maybe you want to do that. Maybe there's a surprise value. Like maybe, you know, the audience not knowing what it is allows you maybe to get things through that you might not get through. You know, if you have a big bruiser, maybe you want to make it small so that, you know, like if I play a giant guy, my opponent knows it's a giant guy, but if I play a morph guy, maybe he doesn't know what it is, and maybe I can, you know, attack with enough creatures and maybe I get that through or something. So there's

reasons to sometimes morph a thing, but a lot of times when you get the creature that's big enough you can hardcast it, you hardcast it. But the neat thing about smorph is because going through the motions made it bigger, sometimes you wanted to do that just to get the extra value to it. But then

there turned out to be a problem, which is Smorf... One of the neat things about Smorf is that there's bluffing that goes on. That when you play a face-down creature, that you get to bluff. And because of the plus one, plus one counter on the card,

there was no bluffing. That if I played this creature, it was not a morph creature, it was a smorph creature. And that meant, instead of it being a potential of any of the face down, it specifically is one of the subset that is smorph. And the belief was that that just didn't play nicely with Morph. So the argument I made at the time is I said, look guys,

Morph is only in Consent of Tarkir. We specifically made a limited environment where Consent of Tarkir isn't played with Dragon's Tarkir. So it's not a limited concern. They'll never show up together in limited. Okay. Now all we're talking about is constructed. And how often in constructed, you know, is it like, oh, I don't

know what it is. Like one of the things we found about morph in constructed is a morph does sometimes get played in constructed, but usually it's a few cards that are really good. Sometimes it's one card that's really good. And that Morph isn't as much a bluffing thing in Constructed. Sometimes is. We were trying to make it a Constructed thing. But my point is, at the time, was that, look, you know, we've had plenty of environments before that had Morph in them where the mystery of Morph wasn't a major thing, you know. And I said, there's still our synergy with Morph. There's things that care about when you turn face up. There's things that care about face downness. There are other aspects. We had a little bit of a Cullus Matters theme because we were trying to tie in a battle of Zendikar. There was a block that follows them. You guys didn't know that at the time.

So I'm like, there is synergy. There is reason to play them in a deck together. I understand you can't bluff them together, but there is other synergies. And it was just a fight that I lost. Now, be aware, I was not the lead designer of the set. Mark Gottlieb was the lead designer of the set. If I was the lead designer, I would have fought hard for Smurf. In retrospect, I'm

upset that as head designer, I didn't fight more for Smurf. I think Smurf was significantly, like, it was a really, really interesting Morph variant. In fact, one of these days we will do Smurf just because Smurf is a pretty cool Morph variant. But anyway,

we ended up going with Megamorph because what we said is, well, how do we take Smurf and adapt it so that it fixes the problem that we're being told? And the problem was, oh, you can't put the counter on the back. So we changed it to say, okay, I'll be Megamorph.

Megamorph means I look like Morph, but when you turn me face up, in addition to just getting the creature, it's bigger than normal. You got a plus one, plus one counter. And so I talked about how I liked, you know, that you made things that made you want to sometimes morph them. That carried over. So there's that aspect of smorph that we got and that carried into Megamorph.

The reason we called it Megamorph, by the way, was a lot of times in design like, well, I knew that I wanted the word morph in the title because it's a morph variant and I wanted you to know it was a morph variant. We called it Megamorph just because it was alliterative and sounded cute.

I don't think the intention was ever that the real mechanic was necessarily supposed to be called Megamorph. I think the idea was that we did want morph in the name. What happened was when they went to name it, what we said to them is, we want morph in the name. This is a morph variant. You know, we didn't want it to be called something completely different and go, oh, it works like morph.

You know, morph should be in the name. In retrospect, like knowing everything we know, Megamorph, there was a point in time where Megamorph was literally the lowest ranked mechanic in our history of ranked mechanics. Now, here's the funny thing. Megamorph showed up in Constructed. It worked. I mean, it was a good mechanic.

It worked well. The reason that people hated it, I think, is twofold. One was the name is dumb. I'll be just up forefront there. And the second was, I mean, really what we should have done is not named it. It should just be a morph card and just all the morph creatures in this set did this thing. Maybe there was an ability or something, if that's a possible thing. There's something to remind you, or maybe just like all the sets in this one do that.

But the thing was, we were trying to, because we had done manifest, we felt obligated to sort of follow through. But the problem is, we kind of half-hearted follow through, which is, we didn't do what we really promised to do,

which basically would have been smurf. Like, we didn't really innovate on the, like, we went to the proto mechanic and like, wow, manifest. That was a really different mechanic. Real quick, let me talk about manifest. Just, I sort of glossed over manifest. What manifest was is we wanted a proto version of, of, of morph.

And the idea was, well, what if you had a mechanic that got things face down, anything face down, not necessarily a specifically morphed creature. it got things face down. Anything face down. Not necessarily a specifically morphed creature. And the idea was, we liked how that would play in a world with morph, because one of the things about morph is,

when I play a morph face down, you know it's a morph creature. I can't bluff you that it's a morph creature. I might bluff you that I have the mana to turn it up. I can play down a morph I can't turn face up. Either it's the wrong color, or I don't have the mana yet, or whatever. So there is bluffing there, but one of the neat things was, can't turn face up. Either it's the wrong color or I don't have the mana yet or whatever. So there is bluffing there, but one of the neat things

was, what if you had a mechanic that turned things face down so my opponent was like, that might not even be a morph creature. And it allowed you to sort of get things on the battlefield that were morph creatures that your opponent didn't know was a morph creature. We thought that was pretty cool. So the idea of Manifest essentially is

spells tell you to take a card and put it face down. Usually it's from the top of your library. We also manifested things from the graveyard and some stuff from your hand. I was happiest with the manifest up top of the library. I guess some of the hand stuff was okay. The manifest from the graveyard is a little weird. I mean, I guess it lacks the hand stuff was okay. The manifest from the graveyard is a little weird. I mean, I guess it lacks the surprise. You know what it is. But anyway,

so we tried that out. Like I said, it was also complicated. One of the things about Khan's Block is, well, I enjoy Khan's Block a lot and it's a very, very fun thing to draft.

It definitely was pushing the complication levels and playing Morph with manifestifest was not helping anything that's some complicated magic right there, those are both complicated mechanics luckily, I mean, I don't think you would do Manifest in a world where you weren't also doing Morph the fact that Morph existed and people sort of learned how Morph played first, I think helped a lot with Manifest

and Manifest just means more in a world where morph creatures exist. So I thought that was kind of cool. But anyway, it was definitely very interesting. And it was a neat experience to do Manifest. And I like how Manifest played out. I don't know whether we'll see Manifest again. It is a very complex mechanic that requires a lot working to sort of make it work maybe it's a fun mechanic

so but anyway so manifest was what we did there so once we did manifest I think we had raised like essentially the original vision for the block was morph, proto-mechanic, alternate mechanic and the alternate mechanic we have set the bar with megamorph

not with megamorph we set the bar with manifestamorph. Not with Megamorph. We set the bar with Manifest. And so people were really expecting us to do something different. I think Smurf was that thing. I think had we done Smurf in the third set, that people wouldn't have been upset. Like, one of my big regrets with Dragon Snark here is I think the one knock against Smurf just isn't enough to offset everything else going on.

I think Smurf would have made Dragons just play different. I think it would have made the limited environment played with Fate Reforged different. I think it would have been, I mean, we would have had to give it a name that somehow referenced Smurf, but I think we would have had a little bit more flexibility to do that.

And to be honest, I think the name would have been more accepted if what we were doing was a little more out of the box. The problem with Mega Morph was it felt like such a minor thing. Now, the funny thing about it is it actually matters. As mechanics go, it actually is interesting. There actually is some difference between the way it plays. So, but it didn't have the splash value. And so what happened is, I mean, the big lesson of Megamorph is expectation and

presentation are important. There's a place and a time we could have done Megamorph where I think Megamorph would have been received positively. Where people would have liked Megamorph. But instead we kind of set Megamorph up for a failure. I'm not saying, by the way, the name was doing it any favors.

But I think we set up expectations and we didn't deliver on them. And like I said, the reason is probably what we should have done is not done Manifest, by the way. Well, either we should have done Manifest and Smurf or not done Manifest. I feel doing manifest

and megamorph was setting ourselves up for the disappointment. Obviously, you know my version. I would have done smorph. I would have done manifest and smorph is what I would have done. But going back, I would have made one of those two changes. I either would have not done manifest or I would have added smorph. I think megamorph

just didn't do that right. Anyway, the other thing we did during Khans of Tarkirblock Khans of Tarkirblock that's hard to say sometimes was we also did some more experimenting with morph. For example, we did

a cycle of cards where you can turn it face up by revealing a particular colored card from your hand. So the idea was I could be tapped out, yet still I could turn the thing face up. Now, because of the rule of five, none of those could beat a 2-3. But we did do some fun stuff where you might not expect something, and they all had a little tiny effect when you turned them face up.

So there was a neat thing where you could get effects that didn't cost mana. You had to reveal a card of the right color, so you had to be playing a deck that had that color in it. There's some cheaty ways around that using hybrid and stuff, but anyway, I... The thing I've learned about Morph

now, this is the third time that we've played, the third block that we've played with it, is A, it's a super fun mechanic. Just the raw mechanic itself is fun. I have something, you don't know what it is. I'm threatening it might be something else. You have to sort of, I can bluff.

In general, I like bluffing in Magic. I think bluffing is fun. You know, natural Magic has some bluffing built into it. But I really like the idea that this whole mechanic has this bluffing aspect to it. I think it's a lot of fun. I think that there's more

to the mechanic than just bluffing. But I enjoy the bluffing aspect of it, especially in Limited, where it shows up a little bit more than it does in Constructed. And so, I think the raw mechanic is a really fun mechanic. The other thing I like about it is there's a lot of flexibility. It can go on...

Most creatures can have morph on them. Some are better than others, but most creatures can. And the triggers do this neat effect where it's a way... You know, we put a lot of enter the battlefield effects on triggers and death on creatures and death triggers on creatures, that it's fun to kind of have spell-like effects tied to creatures. The neat thing about morph is that you get to choose when you get the effect to happen because you choose when you turn it face up. And so there's a lot of just dynamic gameplay.

There's a lot of, like, playing Morph you get some of that with attack triggers and things where, ha ha, I turned it face up and now something's going to happen that you didn't anticipate. The cool thing about the triggers is it just makes a different style of gameplay. But anyway, I guess what I'm trying to say is there are a lot of tools available.

There's a lot of knobs with Morph. So there's a lot of things you can experiment with. You can do fun things with the face-up creature being something you recognize. You can do fun things with having triggers that mimic spells. You can play around with how you turn them face-up, what the cost you do with face-up. There's a lot of fun knobs to play with.

And when people say to me, is Morph coming back? The answer is absolutely Morph is coming back. Morph is, to me, in my mind, one of the top 10 mechanics of Magic. You know, it's a great, great mechanic. I don't know if it makes top five because it's really good, really tight competition. It's for sure top 10 to me.

And it's the kind of mechanic that when you use it, it shines. It is, the block is going to really care about it. Now, as we learned from Time Spiral, and we did in cons, not every archetype cares about morph. The way we did it in cons is, it was a little more ever-present

than it was in Time Spiral, but certain color combinations cared more about morph than others. At least the morph matters cards, if you will, when in particular cards. I think green and blue were in a concept here. But anyway, it is a

mechanic that has a lot of fun gameplay, has a lot of potential for design things, and it also blends with other things well. Like I said, it works well with multicolor. It works well with tribal, as we found with Onslaught. One of the reasons I ended up doing it in, you know, pushing for it in Onslaught was

there was a strong tribal theme, and the idea that I have creatures that you don't know what tribe they are, and all of a sudden become part of a tribe, worked really well with the tribal theme. So it works well with tribes, you know. Morph works well with a lot of different elements in which, oh, I care about a certain card element, and all of a sudden, wait, I do have that card element. Ha ha, you didn't know that.

There's a lot of fun there. So it is flexible. So it is flexible. It is fun. It plays well. So morph is a great mechanic. We will see more of morph. We've seen it three times so far.

I know we haven't seen the last of it. I believe there'll be more morph sets to come ooh anyway there was a lot of traffic today so this was a long podcast that's why I went into great detail on all the different aspects but anyway I hope you guys enjoyed it it was a lot of fun talking about morph

but I'm now at work so we all know what that means it means the end of my drive to work so instead of talking magic it's time for me to be making magic see you guys next time